“Kyle Starks always kills it.
The best part of this one: the parody of Jigsaw from Saw and when one of his victims points out, “This isn’t a puzzle! This is just torture!”
Which is pretty fair, specifically with the trap that is present in this comic.
Because it’s October, and because 2023 is the year of Saw X, the 10th Saw movie (if we’re counting Spiral, which I refuse to do, but whatever), and because Goodread’s algorithms demand sacrifice, I present to you my rundown of the Saw movies.
Saw:
It’s great. I mean, the only critique you hear of it is from people who will say the EXACT same thing the EXACT same way: I don’t like torture porn.
Listen, first of all, for people with deep-seated fears of intimacy, like me, ALL porn is torture porn, okay?
These early movies, though, really are not as graphic or torture-heavy as people think.
I would argue, having watched both recently, that Saw is less graphic and gory than Friday the 13th. If you compare the two series, Jason seems to kill a lot more people in a lot more graphic ways, and the amount of time spent lingering on those kills is higher.
Second, I would argue that the torture in these movies is just a different flavor of the same thing we see in most slashers. In Halloween, is the final girl not tortured by being chased by an overpowering Michael Myers? Is that not psychological torture?
In Hereditary, don’t we watch a mother go through the torture of losing a child? I’m pretty sure we do because that’s why I quite watching it, BORING (defending Saw and condemning Hereditary tells you about my taste in movies, I own it).
In The Lighthouse, I think it’s US, the audience, being tortured.
In Get Out, isn’t there a voyeuristic aspect of watching it that trades in cultural pain?
My argument here is that MOST horror movies deal in some kind of torture over their running time, and it’s really a matter of how that torture is displayed that determines whether a movie is trashy or classy, for most viewers.
I think it’s totally fine to not like Saw movies because they bother you or you find them to be uninteresting, but I don’t cotton to the idea that they’re garbage because they contain “torture.” If that’s the standard, then nothing in the horror genre is really going to be up your alley.
Saw 2:
As is the case with most franchises, the second in the series is more of the same, dialed up a bit. And this usually works just fine. In a series where we’ve got up to 10 parts, rarely is number 2 the most like A number 2.
Rocky 2 is pretty good, Halloween 2 is more of the same, Aliens rules, Leprechaun 2 sucks (there’s always an exception to the rule).
Saw 3:
This is what I usually consider the last really good Saw movie in terms of being a pretty good, mostly self-contained film.
I think the big mistake the filmmakers made was killing Jigsaw, aka John Kramer, played by Tobin Bell, because he was by far their most compelling recurring character, and he brought a lot to the series in terms of energy and gravitas. In a later movie, he makes a brief cameo in a flashback, maybe 15 seconds of screen time. He’s dressed like he (the actor) just stopped by the studio on the way home from the gym, turns in a quick couple of lines, and as he’s walking off-screen, it’s like, “No, Tobin Bell, please, don’t go!”
Saw 4:
I will never understand the casting of two guys who look almost identical as dueling detectives.
This one pulls a trick that’s not bad, but a little underwhelming.
My favorite thing about Saw IV is watching Tobin Bell, Jigsaw, be sort of normal and say things like, “It’s such a lovely day,” completely unironically. He’s still got THAT voice. Oh, and he makes Billy the Puppet, which is terrifying, intending it to be an actual child’s toy, which is totally unhinged and great.
Saw 5:
The âlessonâ to be learned is actually fairly coherent and straightforward, which is totally how this should work in a Saw movie. I mean, Saw 3âs lesson is âyour kid died, get over itâ? Eh, seems A BIT flimsy. The police procedural on the other hand, woof. We watch in painstaking detail as Luke uncovers things we already know, zero mystery there, and the Jigsaw lesson heâs meant to learn makes no sense.
5 movies in and this franchise has not figured out that upping the amount of time we spend with the people trying to BUST Jigsaw is not the move.
Saw 6:
By this point, the most tortured thing in Saw is the timeline.
Saw 3D, aka Saw 7:
This breaks a cardinal rule of horror by not making the 3rd entry the 3D entry, and that’s totally unforgivable.
The premise is great: A guy who was going nowhere in life decides to claim he was a Jigsaw victim who survived because why not? How could that possibly backfire?
We even get a support group for Jigsaw survivors, which gives the movie a great excuse to flash back on other Jigsaw traps that are completely unconnected in the narrative otherwise.
But then…we kind of just go back to the same ol’ shit.
Jigsaw:
I think the mistake is that, somewhere along the line, Jigsaw became a vigilante rather than a crazy person. Punishing people for wasting their lives, because yours has been cut short, is nutso, which works because, yes, putting people into a torture chamber is the behavior of a nutbar.
Putting people into traps because they’re neo-Nazis doesn’t hit the same. It just begs the question, why not shoot ’em in the face?”